The Genesis

Hi, my name is Mehki (pronounced “meh-kai” for those who are sure to get it wrong lol), I’m currently 22 years old. A little background about me, ever since I was young I’ve always loved playing video games. At the time, I really wanted to be a game dev because I thought it was so cool how a team of people could get together and create something that so many people connect to on a daily basis. Whether it be singleplayer games that connect to the player via the compelling story, or multiplayer games that connect you and your friends together.

Of course now I’m pursuing web development, specifically on the frontend. The single thing that drives me to want to create websites is how beautiful some of them can be. Even the most simplistic of designs can look amazing, and seeing some of the insane portfolio websites out there has single-handedly motivated me to want to create aesthetically pleasing websites.

I started learning to code all the way back in 2020. I was going to college for Computer Science, and in my first ever programming class, they taught us Python. I was pretty excited at first. As with any new chapter in your life, it was something fun and refreshing to look forward to. But just as quickly as that feeling came, it went…

Highs and Lows

Around midway through 2021, at the height of COVID and a year through college, I was already extremely drained. To be honest, traditional schooling has never been something I enjoyed. Sitting in a class listening to a professor go on and on for an hour was always something I had trouble with. I found myself unable to pay attention to my classes, and was honestly bored to death from all of the other weird pre-requisites that I had to take that didn’t pertain to my degree at all.

On top of my mental health taking a rapid decline (which isn’t saying a whole lot since it had always been bad in the past), I decided that enough was enough and dropped out of college. Well, it was more like I just stopped going altogether and was forcibly withdrawn from my classes. To be honest, it was liberating. I felt free from the suffocating daily drag that were my hour and 30 minute lectures. But as I quickly found out, too much freedom isn’t always good.

In 2022, I fell into an even deeper depression. Simply put, I felt like a failure. Having that much time on my hands put even more pressure on me, as I could feel the time going by even faster. An entire year went by before I finally started to get back on my feet again and take a crack at learning to code.

The Base of the Mountain

I’m not gonna lie to you, I definitely bought into the self-taught dev hype. I remember watching YouTube videos like this one by Nick White, and thinking to myself: “If they can do it, so can I.”

I began learning web development using The Odin Project as my resource of choice. The one thing that college and traditional schooling in general has that I think is important, is structure. Having a structured curriculum with a system that holds you accountable is something I believe traditional schooling is good at, and something I wanted to replicate for myself. While it’s difficult to hold yourself accountable in a self-taught setting, The Odin Project provided me with the structured curriculum that I was looking for. It was also very nice to be able to track how far I’d come from the beginning.

So I got to work. For a month or two, I was coding every single day, at least one lesson a day. I was burning through the very basics fairly quickly. I was having a lot of fun, and most importantly, I was able to go at my own pace. After getting to a certain point in the JavaScript part of the course, I found myself taking some much needed breaks in-between sections of the course, which helped me avoid massive burnout. Everything was going smoothly, right up until I got to the backend portion of the course…

Diverging Paths

For those unaware, The Odin Project actually has two separate curricula: A Ruby on Rails path, and a Fullstack JavaScript path. I went with the JS path. In the JS path, for the frontend the course teaches you React. And in the backend, it teaches you Node.js and MongoDB for the database. After completing the React course, I moved onto the backend portion. I was very, very quickly turned off from the backend course. If you remember what I said earlier, a lot of what motivated me to become a web dev are some of the beautiful portfolio websites that I saw (if you’re interested, check out this video of websites that really inspired me).

On top of moving away from coding things that influenced the layout and appearance of what the user directly interacts with, the backend material just didn’t excite me nearly as much as the frontend did. Even just reading through documentation on the frontend side seemed infinitely more appealing to me. I stuck with the backend lessons all the way up until the section about authentication, and then gave up on the backend, wanting to pursue the frontend side of things in full force. There was just one problem… I had forgotten most of what I’d learned from the React course.

The Climb

Because I wasn’t practicing my frontend skills while I was learning the backend, most of the knowledge about React I’d accumulated up until that point was completely lost. So, I started from zero. I went back to the beginning of the React course, and relearned everything. It took me about a month to get back to where I was before, which brings us back full circle to the present day.

Right now, although I’ve learned a lot, things honestly haven’t gotten that much better. Often times I’ll be stuck staring at my code editor, unable to think about what to code. I wanna make something cool, I just don’t know what to make, which could be considered a problem itself. I know that sooner or later I’ll figure something out, but I’d rather it be sooner than later.

In Conclusion…

People often compare the software engineering journey to a mountain, but what they fail to take into account is the climb itself. I think a lot of people tend to imagine the climb as a going straight up the mountain, where there’s just one extremely steep trail upwards towards the peak. When in reality that often isn’t the case. The trail is sometimes a spiral staircase that has to wrap the entire mountain several times before reaching the summit. And due to that, you’ll sometimes be stuck towards the base of the mountain for quite a while.

I hope that my story can serve as a testament to that, as well as a cautionary tale to those just beginning their climb to the top of the mountain.

If you’re interested in following my climb, you can follow me here, where I’ll be sure to try my best to update you all on whatever I may be working on next.